Good mood and atmosphere. Characters and story are solid. Controls are pretty bad. Some puzzle elements and levels are unnecessarily tricky. Player character gives hints that don’t fit. That subway level can go straight to hell. 5/10, not because the game is mid, but because it is 50% 3/10 and 7/10. Maybe they should switch to just writing books/comics/movies/shows, instead of designing video games.

I hated 50 percent of this game and I really did love 50 percent of it. So, I give it a five out of ten. A lot of work has obviously gone into this ( music, world, characters, ) but so much of it is a slow, frustrating, headache-inducing slog. If there's another Alan Wake game hopefully it will be more like the original. I should also point out there's some woke nonsense, but it can largely be ignored. Games aren't cheap so I'm sure that BlackRock money came in handy - 5 stars

First, I want to say what I love about this game. First, it stays true to the feelings of the original Alan Wake and even expands upon them. It is slow, plot-focused, and relies upon both a great and relatively straight-forward narrative and atmospheric storytelling and does both well. The soundtrack is alright, much like the first, it works to set the mood. The gameplay is fantastic. The graphics are amazing and can be greatly customized to work on virtually any "gaming" PC. The puzzles are pretty good, not too hard, not too easy. The combat is fantastic, no more endless and repetitive hordes of Taken draining your battery and surrounding you. The combat is perfectly spaced out, frequent enough to consistantly feel like a threat, and sparce enough to not get repetitive. The plot is great, and the DLC add a lot to it. Now for the negative. The first is rather minor, I feel like Saga detracted a little bit from the plot. This game isn't called "Saga and Wake" it's called "Alan Wake 2." She could have been a much smaller part or have been a large DLC, but Alan only having half of the game (less than half if you count the DLC and that random guy you start the game as in the forest) then it should have been given marketed differently.) The second is major, and is what cost this game 5-6 score points in my opinion: This game is far. too. bloody. Wow. It's so violent. I recently got into the Alan Wake series, and loved Alan Wake 1, so I was very upset when I saw the sequel was rated M, as I don't enjoy violence in video games (I might enjoy the challenge of combat, but not the violence itself). I spent hours and hours trying to mod or code the gore out of this game, as I had done with some other titles. After failed attempt after failed attempt, I gave up. I played the game on one-shot mode and intentionally shot from the hip at the taken's legs to exploit a bug to avoid the blood splatter. If they include a setting to lessen the horror, and also to remove the nudity, couldn't they do that for the blood? Very disappointing. I'm looking forwards to Control: Resonance, but not Saga and Wake 2.